Composer David Macbride Bringing His Unanticipated Connections To Wesleyan

David Macbride's musical mystery tour: “Well, what if you don't know who it's by?”

Here's an old salon game, a sort of proto-Mad Libs for pre-YouTube parties. Ask friends for four random words (A, B, C and D), then arrange them in a sentence (A is to B, just as C is to D) and say "discuss!" They'll have to justify how footballs are like applesauce, just as dinosaurs are similar to cruise ships, and so on.

On the surface, the various sound worlds occupied by Italian Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), known primarily for his keyboard sonatas, and American avant-garde composer/thinker John Cage (1912-92), who championed indeterminacy and silence, are like dinosaurs and cruise ships. They couldn't be more diametrically opposed. But shuffle them together, as Hartford composer David Macbride will do at Wesleyan University on Oct. 24, and hear how they begin to interact — to converse with each other, Macbride suggests. Unanticipated connections arise, if only because you say they do.

Macbride, 63, has been thinking about Cage and Scarlatti for decades. His upcoming recital at Wesleyan, titled "Sonatas and Interludes: Keyboard Music by Cage, Scarlatti and Macbride," is part of a Macbride mini-tour — his first as a solo performer — of seven colleges, where he'll play on a digital harpsichord, piano and prepared piano (with objects placed on or between the strings, hammers or dampers, after techniques invented by Cage).

There's a twist: Macbride gives each audience on the tour a list of pieces — more than a performer would likely play in a single concert — that includes 13 Scarlatti sonatas, 15 prepared piano pieces and two additional works by Cage, and five sets of pieces by Macbride (four of which respond to Cage and Scarlatti). Before each performance, using "weighted" chance operations (i.e. pulling slips of paper out of a hat), Macbride determines what will be played, and in what order. He won't tell listeners beforehand whether they're hearing Scarlatti, Cage or Macbride.

"We're so conditioned to read a program and say, 'Oh, it's Brahms,'" Macbride, a professor of composition and music theory at the Hartt School, said. "The composer becomes the most important person in the musical experience. Obviously performers are very important too, but the audience is conditioned: 'This is going to be a Brahms piece: I know what to expect.' Well, what if you don't know who it's by?"

Macbride composed two of his "Three Sonatas (after Scarlatti)" for piano in 1999 and 2000. "I wrote those first [sonatas after Scarlatti] because I had admired the Scarlatti sonatas and had played through them," Macbride said. "I really wanted to write something that would have that binary form and see if I could do something that would be inspired by them but still be my own music." A third sonata was written earlier this year, along with a lot of other music: "Two Sonatas (after Cage)" for prepared piano; a "Sonata (after Cage and Scarlatti)" for piano; and realizations of Scarlatti's K. 426 and 430 (after Cage) for harpsichord.

Macbride first dreamed up the Cage/Scarlatti pairing way back then, in 1999, and a fall sabbatical from teaching this year made it happen. "I was already thinking Cage, because I had a chance to do some work with him back in the '80s, and I had admired him for a long time," Macbride said. "It's sort of like, you have the time: do you have the will? When I decided that this was going to be my project, then I needed to write more music for this recital. Everything came from that."

The tour arrives soon after the release of "A Special Light," a CD of chamber works composed within the last six years. It's an album of memories and personal touches; Macbride performs the title track, which is dedicated to his friend Carl Ricketts, who passed away in 2003, on piano, with longtime Hartt colleague Ben Toth on glockenspiel. It unfolds with luxurious, slow-moving chords and a simple, stepwise melody, often shadowed by the glockenspiel, that shifts sequentially, as things settle into a regular pulse in triple meter. Other works on the CD showcase Macbride's skill at writing for various instrumental combinations: oboe and improvised percussion ("Ave Maris Stella," performed by oboist Stuart Breczinski and percussionist Joseph Van Hassel); various percussion duos (three conversations called "Percussion Park," played by Macbride, Toth and Michael Anderson); solo cello ("1x4" and "1x8," performed by Bryan Hayslett, alongside three and seven pre-recorded backing tracks respectively); solo vibraphone ("Standing," an 11-minute work played by Joseph Van Hassel); and piano and violin (the three-movement "Kelet," performed by violinist Katalin Viszmeg and pianist Pi Hsun Shih, who perform as Kelet).

One thing that brings these disparate works together, Macbride said, is the composer's recent embrace of his Asian heritage; Macbride's mother, who was born in China, moved to the United States in the 1940s.

"I've never been considered to be Asian, because you look at me and you see my last name and you'd never know," Macbride said. "At the same time, some recognition of that has been a long time coming. I figured it's time to live the rest of my life as an Asian person. I've been a Caucasian for long enough."

SONATAS AND INTERLUDES: KEYBOARD MUSIC BY CAGE, SCARLATTI AND MACBRIDE performed by David Macbride, takes place on Friday, Oct. 24, at Wesleyan University's Crowell Concert Hall. Showtime is 8 p.m. Tickets are free. Information: wesleyan.edu.